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Straystown
The shores of Gold Lake on the northern boundary of Ujaland play host to the ruins of several cities, spanning three cultures and over a thousand years. Some of the cities show evidence of having been cyclically occupied, abandoned, and rebuilt by later cultures on the spot of their antecedents. The reasons for this pattern remain unknown, as the largest and most expansive of those cultures, responsible for the ruined city of Straystown on the lake's southern shore, had no writing system and left behind no records. Straystown (as it was named by Hallandic colonists) is marked iron-rich silt that covers much of its footprint, apparently washed up from the adjacent lake. Today, much of the city immediately adjacent to the lake has been buried in that same alluvial muck, but several square miles remain intact, and its bronze-tipped towers still rise over the landscape as a landmark. Other than foreign adventurers scavenging the ruins, the towers experience precious little traffic, as rumors of plague and hungry spirits keep the city and its fellows along the lake's periphery largely untouched even in the midst of thriving contemporary cultures spreading across the plains. As such, visitors find the ruins ripe for plunder, and their tales speak of the city's riches left intact, with ancient skeletons strewn about as if the whole city simply died at once. They also tell of religious iconography showing men and women sprouting dragon wings and flying above the land to consort and commune with gods and spirits. Beyond such tales, Straystown and the other ruins host a shifting population of plains predators and others, drawn out of the depths of the jungle, including all manner of restless dead. Successfully braving the ruins is one thing, but many would-be plunderers of Straystown fall victim to the local taboos regarding the city and disturbing its dead. While avoiding the city themselves, the surrounding tribes take pains to ensure that those who do enter rarely manage to leave. To enter the ruins is considered an affront to the dead punishable by death, and victorious bands of adventurers laden with riches frequently fall victim to spears and arrows upon leaving, their bones joining those of the city. The true reason for the rise and tragic collapse of the Straystown culture and its later inheritors still exists, and it still threatens any living in proximity to the lake itself. Located on an active geothermal field, the lake itself lies above an ancient volcanic vent. Though it hasn't erupted for tens of thousands of years, the magma chamber far below the surface still leaks a prodigious amount of volcanic gas into the lake's waters. Over time measured in centuries or millennia, the lake's lower, colder layers absorb the suffocating gas until some natural event, such as an earthquake, triggers its sudden, spectacular, and deadly release as a rolling, asphyxiating cloud along the lake's margins, killing everything within miles of the shore. Time and time again, civilizations have flocked to the lake and its adjacent rivers for water, transport, and food, and each in turn has fallen victim to the poison fitfully entombed below the surface. Category:Locations Category:Ruins Category:Locations in the Sabo Jungles Category:Locations in Ujaland Category:Locations Category:Locations in the Sabo Jungles Category:Locations in Ujaland Category:Ruins